Simon Pegg offered to drop pants for Weibo followers, changed his mind
I guess the key to hanging onto your new fans in a foreign country is not to dangle a carrot, then take it away.
English actor Simon Pegg has been on massively popular Chinese microblogging platform Weibo for the past few months.
He's really keen on getting new fans in China, and has been earnestly posting personal tidbits and assuring people he's genuine.
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You can see he's been monitoring his follower count himself.
This was posted just a day after the last one.
In an odd stroke of inspiration, perhaps, the Star Trek actor suddenly announced two weeks ago he would drop his pants for a photo if he reached a million followers.
On Tuesday, he reached his goal, and gleefully announced it to his Weibo followers.
What followed in the next 24 hours was an odd stream of hemming and hawing, as Pegg posted teaser after teaser to stall time.
Eventually, he posted this image of his naked action figure. The post has now been deleted, although it's not clear if it was by Weibo (for flouting its nudity policy), or if Pegg couldn't handle the angry responses that followed.
According to Gizmodo, Pegg lost 40,000 fans quickly after he posted that picture on Wednesday, but by Thursday he seemed to regain them and has over a million followers still.
The actor's keenness to court Chinese followers comes as China's box office continues to boom.
China is now the second-largest movie-going market in the world, growing by nearly 50 percent in 2015 to hit 44 billion yuan ($6.5 billion).
Unlike Pegg, other Western celebrities seem to have had an easier time on Weibo.
Famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, earned a million fans on the platform within hours of his account going live in April this year.
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
